Sylvia Plath is one of the most celebrated writers of the 20th century.
Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Sylvia Plath was first published in the children’s section of the Boston Herald, aged eight.
She would go on to attend the University of Cambridge, before marrying Ted Hughes, who would later become the Poet Laureate.
The couple separated after Plath discovered Hughes was having an affair.
In 1963, after a life struggling with clinical depression, Plath took her own life at her home in Primrose Hill, London. She was 30-years-old.
Sylvia Plath’s writing was first published when she was eight-years-old. She would continue to write, despite struggling with clinical depression, before taking her own life aged 30
While she was first published aged eight, that year also brought tragedy for Plath, as her father Otto died.
As a student, she attained a scholarship to Newnham College at the University of Cambridge, where she continued to pursue her passion for the written word.
She met poet Ted Hughes in February 1956 after admiring his work and by June of that year they were married.
Her collections of poetry, Collosus and other Poems, as well as Ariel, are credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry.
Her semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar has sold more than three million copies worldwide and is still read to this day.
The book was originally published under a pseudonym and mirrored Plath’s own mental health struggles in the years before she died.
She was clinically depressed for most of her adult life and underwent electro-convulsive therapy numerous times, before she took her own life in 1963, aged just 30.
At the time she was living in Primrose Hill, London, and had separated from Hughes after discovering he was having an affair.
Hughes, who later became the Poet Laureate, would have to repair Plath’s grave in Heptonstall on numerous occasions after his surname was repeatedly scratched from her gravestone.
An inscription on the headstone reads: ‘Even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can be planted.’